9Tool for Testing Bad Student Programs

This paper presents an effort to address efficient assessment of less than perfect students ’ solutions in a semi-automated code assessment process. Automated and semi-automated code assessment has its drawbacks when it comes to the poorly written and often non compiling programs created by beginner students. The usual assessment automation approaches often lead to adaptation of courses and assignments to the assessment process, while we try to avoid such trend and thus improve the students ’ experience. The solution proposed in this paper focuses on automation of the assessment process itself as opposed to the automation of grading which is the usual approach. This paper presents the concept and design of a tool aimed to support such process as well as presents two case studies that validate the use of the proposed tool